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Amal Alamuddin Clooney, a Disgrace and Embarrassment to Human Rights

September 26, 2016

Amal Alamuddin and George Clooney enjoying a boat ride down the Grand Canal in Venice.

When British-Lebanese Attorney Amal Alamuddin was suddenly thrust into the limelight with her engagement to a Hollywood actor, we at Ikhras were the first to expose her record as a little-known partner to a U.S.-Israeli project and a brutal dictator. Since then the now Amal Clooney has become a Western media darling and celebrity activist, but among principled human rights defenders she has only added to the bill of particulars building against her.

Amal Clooney’s latest foray into the public spotlight has been her stated desire and “delight” to prosecute Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for alleged war crimes in the Syrian civil war. On the surface, her self-aggrandizing statement would not be so untoward were it not for her abysmal record in the field of human rights itself.

Although Clooney is happy to jump on the bandwagon of Western human rights organizations clamoring for the Syrian regime to be held to account, they, like her, turn a blind eye to the longstanding crimes and flagrant human rights abuses committed by United States-backed Mideast tyrants for years—nay decades—before the advent of the Syrian war.

Clooney, for example, served as legal advisor to the unelected King of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa during the (timid) Bassouni investigation into age-old reports of torture, illegal detentions, media clampdowns and general sociopolitical marginalization of the majority population. This specifically came in the wake of the monarchy’s violent putdown of peaceful, pro-reform protests in February 2011 on which Clooney was silent. She also served as defense counsel to Abdullah al-Senussi, the late Muammar Ghaddafi’s intelligence chief. Naturally, this only occurred after the Ghaddafi regime fell under the relative favor of the United States and European Union.

We would not be surprised to soon hear Clooney bravely speak on prosecuting former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, possibly Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin and Evo Morales. However, one will never hear her rail against those warmongering dictators and despots who are the darlings of the West like Recep Tayyip Erdogan, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the Emir of Qatar or the princes of the United Arab Emirates to whom she gave personal advice, yet alone any Israeli official who has served in government since 1948. Indeed, when offered the opportunity by the United Nations to investigate Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Clooney refused, issuing a statement (not through her law office but her husband’s Hollywood agent), that she was “too busy.”